HORTENSIA / HYDRANGEA ( week 3)

Panicale, Hortensia (detail)


BALANCING ACT

Panicale's  profile is pure inspiration. It sits on a mountain and can be easily recognized from all directions.  How you see it establishes your bering. Mount Monadnock does the same thing, you know where you are by the view of the mountain. In Italy I most often see Panicale from the road to Missiano. On the left stands the Gothic Town Hall with its towering bell tower. Facing it, on the right, is the church of San Michele Archangelo. Civic on the left, and religious on the right, sound familiar? I wanted to paint Panicale, but how could I without it looking like some tourist vision? Maybe I need to abstract it a bit?


AN AUTONOMOUS LANGUAGE

Artistic vision is different. In general, deductive reasoning is not how artists interpret information. Instead of linear thinking an artists approach is more circuitious. The visual context is dismantled and reassembled spatially into a new configuration. It is like the visual arena is a puzzle that the artistic mind repurposes by forming abstract relationships. I'll try to explain.


My symbol for Panicale is a circle. The towns shape is an oval that rises circuitously to a peak and then down again. You walk round and round Panicale
 and never really come to an end. ( O.K., maybe at Aldo's for coffee.)
Sometimes you feel as if you are in an Escher print.


THE CIRCLE SQUARED

I start with the circle ( Heavenly, eternal ) and square it with right angles (corporal, earthly),
as Panicale's design is medieval, so is this.

Then, I bisect the square over and over. This is a medieval formula called the Armature of a Square. The convergence of three lines divides the square into thirds (blue lines)

I then remove the Armature and leave the horizontal lines that establish three planes ;the upper, middle and lower. Using the width of a third I inscribe a circle from the center.

This places the town and sky in the upper third, the wall and flowers in the middle and the cloth in the lower. Heaven and Earth are now aligned.

Hortensia, Panicale (in progress)
J. Aponovich
oil on canvas


The hydrangeas  (Amoskeag) from week 2 post , are doing double duty. I painted those "alla prima". After completing one flower for the Amoskeag painting I drew it onto this canvas knowing that I was going to change the color of the flowers, I applied a light underwash of red. The red will affect the color I apply and impart a little dazzle...I hope.

To be continued......






AMOSKEAG UPDATE

I have been drawing the east side pretty carefully. I know from experience that people like to see familiar buildings where they are suppose to be, but its a painting, not reality. As the old Town Hall is prominent in the Panicale painting, I made sure to paint Manchester's City Hall.